Larchmont Chronicle Story Archive

Larchmont Chronicle Neighborhood newspaper representing Hancock Park, Larchmont Village
Miracle Mile, Park La Brea Fremont Place in the Wilshire center area of Los Angeles. Local News and
stories about the local Los Angeles Scene. Historical informattion regarding the Larchmont Chronicle and
Hancock Park area. Founded in 1963 on Larchmont Bouelvard, Los Angeles, CA, California

March 4, 2005

Senior Profile

Andrew Beutmueller

CELEBRATING ITS 50th YEAR, Helga Kasimoff at her Larchmont shop, Kasimoff-Bluthner Piano Co.

Helga Kasimoff loves to talk, but she is not your average chatterbox prattling on about the weather or other trivialities. Her mind is like a Smithsonian grab-bag of arcane facts, histories and anecdotes.

Within minutes of meeting at Kasimoff-Blüthner Piano Co., which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, she presented a biography of Johan Sebastian Bach, the finer points of piano tuning, how to distinguish a pianoforte from a harpsichord, a brief essay on paci-fism, an abridged history on the Anabaptists’ expulsion from Switzer-land, and highlights from the annals of the Blüthner family piano dy-nasty in Leipzig.

The amount of information that she delivers might be disconcerting if she weren’t so articulate, charming, and amusing. She gave me a tour of the gilded pianos and harpsichords in her Larchmont Blvd. store, which is more like a museum.

One piano is over 200 years old and worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. A store that is this impressive is wont to induce a certain superciliousness in its proprietors, but Helga is the exact opposite.

Helga was born in Hanover, Germany before WWII. Early during the war, as a young girl, she was sent away to safety to the nearby Hartz Mountains to go to school. After a six-month bombing pause, her class returned home. The bombings resumed and the family home was partially destroyed in a 42-minute raid.

“I used to tremble during these attacks. We would huddle down in the cellar where it was completely dark and all you would hear was the whistling of the bombs for 15, sometimes 30 seconds before the im-pact. The air was filled with dust...it was like an earthquake that never stopped,” said Helga.

“I became a pacifist, I just couldn’t see it that people had to die. My parents loved people from other nations and other cultures, and to me [it came to the point] where I would rather be killed or die than take another life after what I had seen.”

It was also during this time that young Helga had her first experi-ences with classical music—the boom of timpani and brass at the local opera house thankfully replacing the sound of bombs in the early part of the war. The family found a new home in southwestern Germany which became the French zone of occupation.

Aside from discovering her love for music, she had always been an An-glophile of sorts, so she took to learning English quite readilyShe studied to become a religious education teacher in public school. Frequently she was called to be the interpreter when English minis-ters came to visit her home church in the Palatinate region the Rhine river valley. The impression she made at the conference got her an invitation from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist religious group similar to Quakers; in fact it is the oldest interna-tional pacifist organization. They invited her to their conferences in England.

Also while working as an interpreter at a Lutheran Church World Con-ference, she met a minister from Highland Park, Calif., who was at-tending with his wife. She told the minister she would work for free for the church if he would pay her passage to the United States. He consented, and she got a ticket on the SS United States. The year was 1952, and after Helga’s ship docked, she traveled the famed Route 66 on a Greyhound bus from New York to Los Angeles.

The Fellowship of Reconciliation in Los Angeles invited her to speak at a meeting.

“It was there in 1953 that I met my husband, who had spent WWII in a camp for consientous objectors,” said Helga. “I was speaking against the rearmament of Germany.”

After studying America church history at Chicago Lutheran Theological Seminary, she became engaged to William Peter Kasimoff, a clarinetist in the San Gabriel symphony who also worked as a piano tuner.

They lived on East Villa Street in Pasadena and put together enough money to buy a house and build a store on N. Lake Ave.

She learned the piano trade from her husband. “He was a perfectionist when it came to music, and we both loved to be around live music and musicians,” she said.

In 1976, Kasimoff-Blüthner Piano Co. moved to its present location on Larchmont Blvd. In the meantime, the family had grown to include three sons: Serge, a jazz musician and composer; Ivan, an English teacher; and Kyril, who currently runs the piano store with his mother.

Her husband passed away in 1997. But he left her and her sons the legacy of one of the most unique and renowned piano stores in the United States, as well as a highly regarded expertise in the history and technology of Piano marketing at conferences.

“And by the way,” she said “Bach was a great, strapping fellow with 22 children and an equally fecund head for business. Once, after hosting a rehearsal in his living room, he sent a bill to the Duke of Weimar for the rental cost of the concert salon!” she said with a laugh.

Larchmont Chronicle
542½ North Larchmont Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90004

Editor & Publisher: Jane Gilman
Associate Publisher: Irwin Gilman

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Information about the Larchmont Village, Hancock Park, Miracle Mile, Park LaBrea areas of Los Angeles, california. The larchmont Chronicle provides information, news stories, local events, advertising, real estate information, real estate listing advertisings, Los Angeles area demographics and other neighborhood news.